With the increasingly high demand for mobile broadband services, network operators are rushing to deploy large-scale networks. Such networks include Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks as well as other types of networks. The new services that will be supported on the networks are both data (particularly video) and voice. These services require Quality of Services (QoS) and some services (such as voice) will require guaranteed bit rate bearers to deliver good customer experience. In addition, operators need to differentiate, control, and bill different types of traffic on the network.
Traditionally, policy management for telecommunication networks has focused mainly on network management. In recent years, however, as wireless networks have migrated toward Internet Protocol (IP)-based service environments, policy management has been gaining increasing importance to telecommunication networks that manage and control those services. Thus, policy management becomes an important component in the deployment.
Although policy management has been standardized in some networks, such as LTE networks, the deployment use cases and architecture are not covered in the standard and it is up to each operator to decide how to deploy the network based on its services and use cases. Further, each separate service, or class of services, requests the networks to apply different policy mechanisms, depending on the type of request being handled. Additionally, most of the management functions are scattered across the network and tend to be performed in a localized and static fashion.
For instance, when a user of a networked portable device, such as a cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), laptop, or the like, request(s) access to one or more services offered through the one more networks, there is no common manner to track access and user requests based on type of services, such as voice. Further, there is no common means to manage, store, update, and so forth, the policies.
In a large scale LTE deployment, to support voice and other services, it is important to track media sessions and provide end-to-end session tracking and management. Further, there is no common architecture that enables scaling of policy framework deployment in such networks.
The above-described deficiencies of today's policy deployment architectures are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with conventional systems and corresponding benefits of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein may become further apparent upon review of the following description.